Pleiades: Get to know the British post-rock quintet big on storytelling, musical ideas and building community

'The Pleiades' is the name given to the cluster of stars in the Taurus constellation, known as the Seven Sisters. It's a more intelligent and wondrous name for a band than many you could pick, but it suits Manchester's Pleiades and their expansive music and themes perfectly. With elements of post-metal, hardcore, a dash of prog and a wealth of lyrical storytelling, the quintet's music has a lot to chew on, particularly on their awesome new album, Affinity With.

To help you catch up, they explain everything you need to know, in their own words…

Pleiades aren't ones for simple lyrics and spoon/moon/June rhyming. On Affinity With, they tell a great many tales through the lyrics, in an attempt to help understand the world.

"As a band we're all about telling stories, combining interesting historical and natural stories to tell spin relatable narratives about things people can connect to," they say. "On the album we have conversations between birds and bees about the impact humanity, talk about rumours of Alexander the Great, and write about the Farallon Egg war during gold rush era California. Interesting angles and points of view can be covered when you take these external stories as the basis for a song, which we think gives people a lot more depth to search through when they hear them and look up the lyrics. We released a lot of singles in the run-up to the album release to give each story its own time to shine, but the album brings it all together as a collection of stories about empathy and human nature."

In their lyrics, Pleiades often look to history for inspiration, while also looking for ways to keep the experiences relatable. Just check out Siberian or Amos Clift from the new album. Did you ever think you'd get rock lyrics from a lighthouse keeper's POV?

“Amos Clift is really a track that sits at the core of the storytelling in Affinity With," explains singer Andrew Calderbank. "The story is told from the perspective of lighthouse keeper Amos Clift, observing the Egg War of 1863 in San Francisco, where food shortages caused by the population boom from California’s Gold Rush led to an all-out war between rival gangs over seabird eggs on the nearby Farallon Islands. Clift’s character is used as a guide to recount how desperation and hunger led to mass greed and violence, holding a magnifying glass to the inherent and destructive flaws of human nature.

"Siberian is an exploration into yearning for solitude and anonymity - places and states of mind that wealth can’t satisfy." he continues. "Through the story of Alexander I of Russia, and also being inspired by a friend of mine who spiritually is such a rich person and is in a constant state of wanting to better himself, Siberian was able to have an historically relevant narrative but also one that would be personal and relatable."

Not for Pleiades the trusty three-minute verse-chorus-verse layout. Often, their songs sprawl off into the distance, with a satisfyingly rich sonic landscape that keeps you guessing where they'll go next.

"Musically we aim for our songs to take a listener on a journey, breaking free of traditional structures and always ending songs in a different place to where they started," they say. "The songs were all written as collaborations together, and we look for where the music wants to go in order to ebb and flow with the emotions we want to convey rather than trying to follow any sort of script about how we should do it. It’s created an organic progression through the album that draws from lots of influences or post rock/ emo/ hardcore/ art rock. It leads to weird concoctions like Afrobeats in Stomach, Latin guitar riffs in Siberian and spoken word crescendos in No Living Thing. We want listeners to find catchy hooks interspersed with intricate soundscapes and visceral hardcore, led by creativity and for nothing to feel forced or there 'for the sake of it’."

For all their high-minded artistry, Pleiades also have a grit to them, especially live.

"A lot of us are from DIY punk backgrounds and really want to bring that energy to our shows, so a lot of our songs are written with that in mind," they explain. "It’s most important to us to relay the music properly live and to bring a chaotic energy, really ramping up the heaviness. We want people to leave having had a memorable, unique experience, and for us and our music to have forged a personal connection with them."

The connection Pleiades speak of is about more than getting people to listen to their music. They want to bring similar-thinking people together with it, too.

"What we enjoy most of all is the forging of a community, meeting new people on either side of the stage barrier," they say. "Whether we're first on or headlining, we always aim to forge relationships and create new experiences with like-minded people. We’re particularly passionate about the Manchester scene and our post-hardcore and post-rock peers. The musical journey is definitely better shared."

Affinity With is out now